Orbital Decay
by Mel88
Summary: Orbital decay: The gradual decrease in distance between two orbiting bodies over time, which, when left unchecked, inevitably leads to collision.


**Author's Note**: This piece was written for the 2019 HP Drizzle Fest. Thank you to my beta, dormiensa, for keeping my commas in order and cracking that whip!

**Warning(s):** Angst, Infidelity, Maternal Mortality (off-screen), Stillbirth (off-screen)

* * *

**Orbital Decay**

_Autumn_

What was a girl to an eleven-year-old boy?

To a lonely one, maybe everything. To a bored one, maybe a trifle. But to Draco Malfoy, who had no want of friends, and when at Hogwarts, where wonders roamed the hallways and sat waiting in classrooms, a girl meant little. A girl who wasn't in Slytherin meant even less. A Gryffindor girl might not exist at all.

As such, he was slow to notice her. He was too focused on perfecting his own work in their Friday morning Potions classes to care about hers and too intent on showing off during their flying lessons to remark on her teetering attempts.

It was her association with Potter and Weasley that piqued his curiosity. Everyone knew about the troll during Halloween; the trio had been practically inseparable ever since. But aside from being bookish and outspoken and having the bad luck to be caught out in the loo, Draco couldn't understand what was so special about her. Why did Potter choose her, when Draco himself had been rejected?

He tried to be circumspect. He checked the Hogwarts library first, found his family tree and traced back every branch. When that yielded no results, he expanded the search. Crabbe, Goyle, Parkinson, Bulstrode, Greengrass, and Nott. Lestrange, Black, Rosier, and Rowle. Weasley. Hell, even Longbottom. He studied the genealogies of every pure-blood family he knew, but her name never appeared. Over Christmas, his father confirmed it.

Hermione Granger was a Mudblood.

Dirty. Unworthy. No better than a thief.

Intelligent. Adept. Already recognized as one of the more talented students in their year.

Until then, Draco's education had been a litany of aggressions against people like her: backhanded remarks whispered by his father on Diagon Alley's crowded corners; his mother's clipped explanations of Aunt Bellatrix's imprisonment; nighttime horror stories he, Crabbe, and Goyle exchanged over their summertime visits. She was a contradiction, introducing corrosive doubt into the foundations of his ego. Believing anything else would have required him to uproot the past eleven years of his life. Forming a new narrative was much simpler.

Hermione did not fit into the shape of a Mudblood, which made her dangerous. She was the next stage of their evolution, and Draco needed to keep his distance.

* * *

_Winter_

The years grew cold, and Draco with them, the warmth of his youth drained by his pursuit of power.

He took the Dark Mark. The Dark Lord set him on a path to glory, effectively eliminating the need to question his beliefs. The future might have been a vague, glittering bauble in a world he couldn't imagine, but that was okay. The goal of it was almost secondary, anyway. What mattered was that it was _his_. The Dark Lord trusted _him_, which made him unique and special. Elevated.

The trail became more treacherous the higher he climbed. He worked himself to breaking in helping the Death Eaters infiltrate Hogwarts. No one had expected him to succeed, and the initial rush of success was sweeter for it. But the high faded fast; it was a false summit. His true goal rested at the top of the mountain. He thought he could reach it. He'd already come so far.

But he choked on the final breath, the air too thin and the sacrifice too great. He could not kill his Headmaster, and the failure exposed him. Laid bare the truth of what he'd always feared was at the core of his personality: cowardice.

Things fell apart after that. His glittering future lost its shine, and Draco's priorities shifted from climbing to surviving. In the muddle of his seventh year, he realized the surest way down was out, and that _out_ almost certainly meant his death. In his darkest moments, the idea had appeal.

Then Hermione was brought to the manor.

He recognized her immediately. How could he not? Covered in blood and filth, thinner than he'd ever seen, but her eyes — scared, determined, calculating. He'd seen her like that too many times not to know her.

He recognized her screams, too. Not because he'd heard them before but because he knew their origin. Occlumency lessons were a distinct brand of torture, as they necessitated being on the receiving end of Legilimency. Bellatrix had excised his memories with a brewer's precision, plucking them forward and reveling in the pain they brought. She had violated him. The memory made him nauseous.

She could have done the same to Hermione, but his aunt chose pain instead. A crude weapon, unreliable but satisfying.

He felt no satisfaction in hearing Hermione scream. It curled his stomach to witness her writhe. The situation revolted him, and he looked around, finally _seeing_ where his choices had brought him: Bellatrix's twisted smile and manic look, her cruel laughter echoing through the hall; Narcissa's iron grip on his forearm; Lucius watching with bated breath.

Reality crashed down on him like an avalanche. Everything Draco had ever been asked to do, everything he had been taught to believe, everything he had accepted without question…

It was wrong.

It was all wrong.

* * *

_Spring_

Draco started his day on a broomstick, as was his habit now. He flew fast enough to require a Shielding Charm, and in mere minutes, Malfoy Manor was nothing more than a dark, distant speck on an unnamed hill.

He dropped his broom and stood alone in the middle of a heath. Coarse grasses caught the hem of his trousers, which grew damp from the morning dew. The flowers had yet to uncurl, waiting for more than the present hint of sunshine. Draco had tracked the season's progression by the flowers, watching them sprout, bud, and bloom in innumerable shades of purple.

He closed his eyes, inhaled a deep breath, and tried to forget. This was one of the few places he could get close to blessed blankness, separate from the suggestion of structure. It might be necessary to work and live within walls, but Azkaban had given him mild claustrophobia. Small spaces made him anxious, but standing in the middle of nowhere made him feel safe. Like he could pass unnoticed through the world.

That was all he wanted, and he'd been on the crux of getting it. He'd moved back into his ancestral home. He'd gotten a low-level job at the Ministry of Magic. He'd kept his head down and performed his mandated community service not with a grin but without grumbling. He'd made mistakes, and he'd atone for them.

Narcissa wanted more. As soon as her arcane calculations of decorum had indicated safety, she'd set him up with Astoria Greengrass.

Astoria hadn't seemed to mind the timing, but the move felt prescribed in a way that made Draco's skin itch. Every conversation felt like a step in a dance, every date a flourish. The perfect waltz that had no room for improvisation or mistakes. Dating her was a different version of the same childhood trap, its rhythm soothing him into complacency.

He couldn't do it.

He planned to give her the old line: _It's not you, it's me_. By his calculations, it was eighty percent true.

Because it wasn't him.

It was Hermione.

Draco had the experience to recognize infatuation and the self-awareness to name it, but at no age would he have had the strength to resist it. His attraction to her, forbidden for years by blood and circumstance, now had no tethers. It shot from the soil like a vine and wrapped around his ankles, curling and climbing until it consumed him.

He could escape it. He could hack it away with the double-bladed scythe of propriety and expectations, refuse it water and sunshine and devote those life-giving resources to Astoria or any other pure-blood woman that caught his eye.

But he didn't want to.

He wanted to be overrun.

* * *

_Summer_

He talked to her; she talked back. It was easy in the Ministry's halls. He dropped her a memo with a question on policy. He detoured past her desk on the way to the kitchenette for tea. He popped into her office with a risky invitation to lunch. She declined but was too friendly not to reschedule, and Draco took the win.

The days were heady and warm under her luminescent smile. She and Ron were together, getting serious, but that was no reason they couldn't talk. No reason he couldn't try to show her a different way, a path she might not have seen before.

Eventually, Hermione's curiosity overcame her caution. She took his hand and stepped off the paved road. They lost themselves in the tall grasses and sweltered together.

Only once.

Just twice.

He claimed to have lost count, but each night they spent together was seared into his memory and blistered onto his skin. Looking at her prompted the taste of berries, sweet and tart and fresh.

But summers were never just characterized by sunshine. Dark clouds lined the horizon, seen but ignored until neither of them could reasonably justify it.

Rumors swept through their office, a foreboding gust. She denied them, but Draco waited, sensing the opportunity. They were off the beaten track, but that didn't mean they had to return to the one they'd left. They could fight their way through the brush and find a new one.

They could go public.

He expected hesitation, but Hermione's automatic refusal of the idea caught him off guard.

Then the rains began. They went weeks without speaking.

When he forced the confrontation, the storm had truly arrived. They lashed at each other with a fury, hurling insults like hail. Lightning struck, and with its destruction came blinding clarity.

Hermione was ashamed of him and of who she was when they were together. The war heroine who had strayed from her childhood beau. The woman who was too afraid or too noble or too much of each to buck expectations and pursue her own happiness.

Draco had put her on a pedestal, but the truth was that she was no better than him. In fact, she was worse. She wanted the status quo, and Draco had to give it to her because, for all her myriad flaws, Hermione was not a capricious woman. She had decided for them both, and no further discussion was needed.

The tempest ended, leaving them miles apart.

* * *

_Spring_

Two seasons alone, bitter, angry, and far too tempted to ruin her life by telling the truth. He'd drafted the note and walked it to the owlery. Dozens of times, he'd counted the stairs to the top of the drafty tower, but, again, he faltered at the last moment. He'd never attached the letter to a bird. He'd gotten close, but it felt like a reversion, unworthy of the man he wanted to be. Or maybe it was his innate cowardice working to spare him pain.

He kept it, though. In the top left corner of his home office desk. Bound, sealed, and addressed to a man he'd never considered a rival, to say nothing of an equal.

Somewhere in those dim, intervening months, he'd reconnected with Astoria. He wasn't sure how, he guessed it was Narcissa, but he no longer had the energy to fight it. He'd tried once and failed. If she was his future, his fate, then why bother? They would just end up right back here anyway.

Astoria was pretty, fragile, and demure: everything a pure-blood woman should be, though after experiencing Hermione's brand of independence, he couldn't help but think that Astoria had taken her etiquette lessons too much to heart. But she held his hand and said the right things. She helped him feel human again after six months of a miserable half-life. He owed her for that, at least.

As the first, tender shoots of saffron crocus began to push up through the thawing earth, Draco couldn't help but wonder:

Was spring's beauty inherent, or was it only so sweet because it followed such a bleak and unforgiving season?

* * *

_Winter_

Astoria had always favored winter, with her pale skin, raven hair, and dark eyes. Her beauty was striking, but what it hid was even more so. Like an iceberg, only a small fraction of her true self was visible to the outside world. The polite, soft-spoken lady masked a fierce and canny woman who knew what she wanted and would use whatever means necessary to get it. She was fascinating and layered, and though they had been married for over a decade, Draco doubted he would ever get to see all the parts she had hidden.

This was one view he'd never expected: his wife, wearing her favorite, form-fitting, wine-red dress, laid out in stark contrast against the plush white padding of her coffin.

He could almost pretend that he was seeing her set against a blizzard. Could almost pretend her closed eyes were blinking. Not sewn shut, for she was above such petty domesticity. Not sleeping, for she had never slept so soundly. Astoria had always tossed and turned, dreaming fantastical scenes and acting surprised when what she'd seen came true in part or in whole.

She hadn't dreamt this. Or if she had, she hadn't shared it with him.

He waited for her eyes to flutter open. Yearned to see dark brown against the snowstorm, two fixed points upon which he'd moored his drifting life. Strong when he wasn't. Was that the burden laid upon all the women in his life?

A murmur drew Draco's gaze up and away from the body. Scorpius, who was old enough to understand the trauma that had decimated their lives, was too young to stand by his father and accept the condolences of strangers. He'd been sent to bed with a light calming draught, leaving Draco to perform the task alone. To nod and wince and respond in all the ways that were required from a newly-fashioned widower.

He stood by Astoria's coffin all afternoon and well into the evening, ignoring Narcissa's whispered pleas for him to take a seat, take a break, have some water, a bite to eat. He felt numb to the physical toll of it, shoulders square and strong under the burden of public grief.

Until Hermione pressed her fingers into his.

She came with her husband and young children — a girl Scorpius' age and an infant boy he couldn't look at for fear of breaking. He endured Weasley's rote sympathy. He managed to lift the corner of his mouth as the little girl looked him in the eyes and asked after Scorpius. She rattled off that they shared primary education classes, that if it was okay with her mum, and with him, of course, sir, she could bring Scorpius his books and assignments, and noted how difficult it could be to get caught up, and expressed her concern with Scorpius falling behind, and offered her help and tutelage should his son need it, and…

Hermione ushered her daughter forward, toward Weasley, who took her hand and led her over to Potter and his family, the lot of them whole and thriving in a way that made him ache.

She said his name. He looked at her and was somewhat surprised to see her crying. One of the few, despite the untimeliness of his wife's death, the loss of her beauty, the loss of potential…

Holding her baby to her chest with one hand, she reached out to him with the other. The press of her skin was soft, warm, and fleeting. In its place was a small glass carnation, clear at the center and running to dark pink around the edges. Draco held it in his palm and felt sorrow pulse off her. Shared it. Felt his chin quiver and the full weight of his loss almost press him to his knees.

They hadn't had a public funeral for his daughter, born still as her mother hemorrhaged and followed her beyond the veil.

He couldn't think of it anymore. Couldn't lose his composure, with hours to go and rites yet to be performed. So, he buried it, like he had buried his daughter, would soon bury his wife, and, with them, any hope he'd had for a happy, complete life.

Draco stiffened his shoulders again, dropped the gift into his pocket, and muttered his inadequate thanks. She hesitated, like she wanted to say more, but thought better of it. After a moment, she walked away.

His vigil continued.

* * *

_Autumn_

It was a windy day when Draco returned to Hogwarts sporting his Slytherin green. A chill laced the air, the first portent of a hard winter, but he could only feel it when clouds obscured the sun. The day was bright, otherwise. Cheery. And Draco was in a mood as fair as the weather.

He raised a friendly hand to the people he recognized — parents of Scorpius' housemates, mostly, and some distant acquaintances who had children of their own. A lifted chin was enough for others — old classmates with whom, by choice or by chance, he hadn't repaired the rifts of childhood.

He made the climb to the top of the Quidditch box reserved for the players' families. He wasn't late, but everyone else was early enough that seating was limited. There was a middle seat next to an older couple he didn't recognize but, from their nasty glares, had nevertheless formed an opinion of him. There was also an end seat on the far side of the box. Next to Hermione.

Another couple came up behind him. They whispered his name, and what had felt like a weighty decision became easy: he ascended the steps, crossed along the back side of the box, and descended a couple of rows. He cleared his throat to get her attention.

"May I?"

Hermione flinched, surprised to see him, but her smile was ready as she gestured him down.

"Please."

He settled himself onto the bench, and she shifted, but not to put more space between them. Her hip pressed against his, and he thought he could feel the warmth of her skin through the layers of their trousers and cloaks.

"No Potter today?"

"Harry's out," she said, keeping it vague though everyone in the United Kingdom knew what was happening with the Aurors in France. "And Ginny's on assignment covering the Harpies' World Cup press tour."

"And Weasley?"

Her smile snagged on a bitter memory. She stared out at the pitch.

"We trade off. It's easier that way. This was supposed to be his weekend, in fact, but he couldn't get away from the shop. Something about a new shipment… Not that I mind," she amended. As if Draco needed convincing of her devotion to her children. As if it wasn't obvious. "I love it here."

The wind caught her curls and rich autumn sunshine shone in her eyes. Her contentment was infectious, and Draco felt his posture ease. He was glad to be at Hogwarts again, too.

"What position is Rose playing this year?"

"Beater, if you'll believe it."

"I do," he said, rubbing his jaw for effect. "As I recall, her mother has a vicious right hook."

Hermione laughed, and they exchanged a look. A re-estimation, as light and quick as a Snitch.

"Scorpius is still at Seeker?"

"Too lanky for much else." His son favored Astoria in personality and temperament. In coloring and build, however, he was Draco's double. "He'll grow into his frame."

A swell rose from the audience as fourteen green and red blurs burst from the locker rooms and raced around the pitch. Over the next four hours, their conversation occurred in fits and starts. They discussed plays and risk. Draco mentioned common strategies, and Hermione feigned interest so convincingly that he almost asked if she'd started playing. They shared sips of her contraband cider ("Lightly spiked," she confessed _sotto voce_) and split a bar of caramel-filled chocolate packed for just such an occasion ("Because you never know how long these things will go," she noted with a sigh after hour three).

When Scorpius dove, they both shot to their feet. His son hurtled across the pitch, angled terrifyingly close to the ground, then pulled up, almost vertical. The stadium erupted: Scorpius had the Snitch clutched in his left fist. Draco leapt, cheered, and, before he could think too much about it, wrapped an arm around Hermione's shoulders and pulled her close to share his joy.

Her arm slid around his waist, cheering and waving as the Slytherin team took its victory lap.

Draco's chest swelled with pride. He and Hermione had always fit like this, despite where they'd come from, the choices they'd made, and the separate lives they'd led. He had long ago given up the idea that he could share another's life. After Astoria's death, it had seemed impossible to _want_ to, unthinkable that he could feel anything but a shallow desire for another woman.

But Hermione had always been different, and this impossible moment felt natural, almost expected. Like their reunion could only have resulted from of a lifetime of close passes and near-collisions, their orbits inching ever closer as the seasons passed.

**The End**


End file.
